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Saturday, September 10, 2011

Bin Laden Made News Not History

The West faces a host of urgent tasks — the first being to
reassert diplomacy's place in international politics

Ten
years after September 11, the instant history is being written. In the French
newspaper Le Monde, a highly intelligent commemorative supplement dubbed the
period The Decade of Bin Laden. But is that right?

In
the ten years since September 11, the combined GDP of Brazil, Russia, India,
and China (the BRICs) rose from 8.4 per cent of the global economy to 18.3 per
cent. Anglo-Saxon-style capitalism crashed.

Moreover,
it was the decade when internet access went global — from 360 million people in
2000 to more than two billion people today. It was a time when the war in Iraq
divided the world, but also when a civilian surge for freedom finally hit the
Middle East, as millions of Muslims turned for inspiration to democratic
governance, not global jihad.

None
of this was the doing of Bin Laden. To be sure, Al Qaida was (and is) a new and
serious kind of threat. Born of 30 years of tumult in the Muslim world, Al
Qaida has a worldview, not just a local view. It aspires not just to change,
but to revolution.

The
notion of a ‘war on terror' in reply was misguided in part because it allowed
people to think that Al Qaida was just another terrorist group like the IRA,
the Baader-Meinhof gang, or the Red Brigades. It wasn't — and isn't. But it
also aggrandised Bin Laden's claims to be a history maker.

I
don't see any alternative to our determination, in 2001, to drive the Taliban
from control of Afghanistan. The tragedy is that, once that battle was won, the
peace was lost. The Bonn conference of December 2001, called to draft a new
Afghan constitution, excluded the vanquished. Whereas America built its own
democracy from below, on federalist principles, Afghanistan had imposed upon it
one of the most centralised states in the world — despite being one of the
world's most decentralised societies.

Tragically,
the signals from former Taliban in their southern Afghan stronghold of Kandahar
— a demand to be left alone in exchange for staying out of politics — were
misread. They were driven into Pakistan, where they reconvened.

The
West faces urgent tasks — the first being to reassert diplomacy's place in
international politics. The late US statesman Richard Holbrooke once said to me
that America since September 11 has suffered a ‘militarisation of diplomacy.'
We now need the opposite. In a world of asymmetric threats, we should follow
the US defence department's field manual: in counterinsurgency, politics
require primacy. Second, the West must rethink its notions of a balance of
power, because they no longer concern just states, but also peoples. As the
Arab Spring has shown, the ubiquity of information means that future coalitions
need to be formed at the micro-level, in villages and valleys of Afghanistan
and Pakistan, rather than only at the macro-level, in terms of how we manage
the global system.

Multilateralism

Third,
we are entering an era of resource scarcity. Aside from the atomic bomb, this
is the most dangerous security development in two centuries. If you think the
blame game in Europe over Greece is bad, just wait for arguments about who is
causing drought and food-price inflation. These are not just ‘environmental'
questions. They are questions of justice and responsibility, and stronger
regional and international institutions are needed to address them.

Finally,
the West must rediscover the joys of multilateralism and shared sovereignty.
That is tough when, in Europe, nobody wants to pay Greece's bills. But
multilateralism is a global insurance policy against abuse of power by any
state. The problem is not that the European Union and other multilateral
institutions are too strong; it is that they are too weak. Indeed, regional
institutions in the Arab world, Africa, Latin America, and East Asia are still
in their infancy — and need to grow up fast.

Over
the past few centuries, there have been three systems of international order:
economic and military domination; a balance of power; and shared sovereignty.
They can coexist, as they more or less did in the years after 1945 in various
parts of the world. But America today is on the back foot, economically and
militarily. New powers like China and India are rising, not risen, mixing
assertiveness with emphasis on their continued ‘developing' status. Europe,
where shared sovereignty has been embraced, is struggling to solve its own
problems, never mind becoming a global player.

A
century ago, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Angell argued in The Great
Illusion that economic security enables military expansion, not vice-versa. In
fact, neither is achievable without political vision. That is the most
important lesson of the post-September 11 decade.— Project Syndicate, 2011

-This commentary was published in The GULF NEWS on 10/11/2011
-David Miliband, Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 2007-2010, is a British
member of Parliament

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...